Page 728 - Week 02 - Thursday, 23 February 2012
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MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Leader, ACT Greens) (11.45): I start by thanking my committee members—Mrs Dunne and Mr Hargreaves—and also, of course, acknowledging the hard work of the secretariat—Dr Brian Lloyd, who was helped by Lydia Chung and also Paul Oliver. I thank them very much for their hard work, along with all of the people who put in submissions to this inquiry and took the time to put their thoughts down on paper or to turn up and to give oral evidence.
I will start my comments with the dissenting comments from Mrs Dunne. I agree with Mrs Dunne that the committee was very professional in its approach in discussing the issues. There were different issues around the table. So I am surprised to see in the dissenting comments the issue that was just raised by Mr Hargreaves, which was that members of the committee had met with people who were part of this inquiry, those putting in submissions and so forth. I made it very clear that I was not going to meet with anybody. Mr Hargreaves has indicated that he met with a couple of the groups that were actually on either side of the debate, and Mrs Dunne indicated that she was meeting with a group as well. I find it a little breathtaking in a way that there seems to be this pushing forward around an unfortunate practice that she, in fact, engaged in herself.
We also go over to another issue she raised. She said in her comments that she felt issues were not considered significant human rights problems and have been largely downplayed by the majority of the committee. Again, I find that just too much to let go by. In fact, these issues were widely canvassed. That is why, if you go to the report, you will see that recommendation 9 quite clearly picks up on this. I think she makes a comment that all we wanted to do was put up multilingual signs in brothels. Well, yes, we do; we do want to put up information for sex workers in brothels. But apart from that, we also took up the Human Rights Commission’s suggestions around offences under section 17 of the Prostitution Act being recast to reflect section 13, freedom of movement, and section 26, freedom from forced work, of the Human Rights Act 2004 and that penalties for offences be consistent with those under that act. Again, I dispute the claim that we did not take it seriously and, in fact, did not have a response to that.
The second-last point is the issue of the under 18-year-olds being in brothels. Mr Hargreaves has touched on this. We felt this was a very important matter that needed to be addressed, and that is why the recommendation in the report is about absolute liability. It very much puts the onus back on the brothel owners to ensure that their employees, the sex workers working in their brothels, are not under the age of 18.
We had this discussion around sole operators, and I am very clear on this—there was not a rejection of the idea that while we were being tough on brothels there was going to be a different standard. We very much talked about that, and in fact, if you go to the text of the report at page 148, you will see it is picked up in the narrative there. If sole operators are no longer required to register as brothel operators as recommended, their premises would no longer have the status of a registered brothel. This may create a need to insert a new provision in the act to prevent minors from being exposed to commercial sexual transactions at sole operator premises. So the report picks up the issue. If this path is going to be taken, certainly there will need to be a change to the law. Of course, I very much support that.
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